Retail doors The Lip Bar now sits in, from Target to CVS
In 2015, two women walked onto the set of Shark Tank with a vegan lipstick line and walked off with nothing. One investor, Kevin O'Leary, called them “colorful cockroaches” and told them to quit before it was too late. Every panelist passed. This summer, one of those women, Melissa Butler, was named a winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2026 award for Michigan and Northwest Ohio, and moves on to national consideration this fall.
The distance between those two moments is the whole story, and it's a Detroit one. Butler grew up in the city, went to Cass Tech, and studied business finance at Florida A&M before landing an analyst job at Barclays on Wall Street. She had the exact resume young people are told to chase. She walked away from it.
The Lip Bar started in her Brooklyn kitchen in 2012, made in the margins of brutal finance hours, because the beauty industry wasn't building products for women who looked like her. She taught herself cosmetic chemistry from books and cold emails to experts. For three years, every product came from her own hands. In 2014 she quit Wall Street outright, before the business was anywhere close to replacing her salary.
"Failure inspires. It inspires you to do better. That is how Butler has described the years after the no."
That's the mindset that carried her through the rejection everyone remembers. Being told to quit on national television could have ended it. Butler has said the lesson she took instead was simple: if you know you have a good idea, don't let naysayers talk you out of it, even the ones sitting on a panel with a camera pointed at them.
Then she went and built the thing they said wouldn't work. The Lip Bar landed in Target in 2018 and became one of the retailer's best-selling makeup brands, growing from three shelves to twenty-four, roughly a 700% expansion. It reached Walmart in 2021. In 2022 the company closed an oversubscribed 6.7 million dollar raise, having already sold more than two million units. By 2023 it expanded into thousands of CVS stores, pushing past 5,300 retail doors nationwide.
Along the way the brand picked up a following that included Michelle Obama, and eventually an admission from the man who wrote it off. Years later, O'Leary conceded the obvious about Butler and her team: “you gotta applaud them.” The rejection that was supposed to be the ending became the most quoted line in her origin story.
What makes her a real builder, and not just a comeback headline, is what happened next. As the retail landscape shifted and even big partners pulled back, Butler kept the company growing by diversifying where and how it sells, protecting the business she spent a decade building rather than riding a single shelf. That instinct, to adapt without losing the mission, is the hard part nobody puts on a highlight reel.
This is exactly the blueprint ANF exists to put in front of people. Bet on yourself before anyone else will, treat every no as data instead of a verdict, and build the thing the industry swears nobody wants. Butler didn't win Entrepreneur of the Year by fitting into the old system. She outbuilt it, from a kitchen, with her own hands.
Detroit made her. Now the whole country is buying what she made, and the establishment is finally calling it what it always was.